Friday Jul 26, 2013

More and more business users are taking the driver’s seat in business
process management (BPM) initiatives. To ensure flexibility,
productivity, and success, their BPM suites must make it easy to design,
manage, improve, and control business processes—even unstructured ones.
In this webcast, leading industry analyst Bruce Silver will discuss what the term business-driven means and how case management and support for unstructured processes help organizations better serve their customers.

Join this webcast and learn about:

Oracle Business Process Management Suite and how it enables business managers and analysts to easily design and manage process

The capabilities that make Oracle’s BPM solution more business-driven, flexible, and agile

The
addition of adaptive case management and how it now enables users to
manage unstructured processes, covering all possible process usage
patterns and scenarios

Monday Apr 15, 2013

In order to do business, companies need to buy and develop many
applications. These applications help companies perform various
functions. Usually, employees may need to access multiple applications
to perform an end-to-end function or what we call a business process.

Take,
for example, Order Management. In order to take and complete an order,
you may need to access CRM system, Inventory Management, Fulfillment,
Shipping and Accounting systems. Most of the times these applications
are standalone or at best have point-to-point integration. There may be
many activities that you need to perform while processing an order that
may not be covered with any of these applications. These activities are
called process whitespaces, the steps that are not covered with any of
your applications. Usually such activities are performed using emails,
phone calls, memos, exchanging spreadsheets etc. These are the shadow
processes in your organization - the undocumented, unaudited,
non-traceable activities. So where is the problem, you may ask. Problem
is that these manual activities cause inefficiency in the organization.
In the example above, you may not have visibility into the status of an
order at any given point in time, and you’ll tend to run business using
dated reports. If a customer calls in to check order status, your
employees have to access multiple systems to provide that information to
the customer. This leads to waste as well as leads to employees taking
decisions based on outdated or incomplete information.

In
some cases, your company may also be exposed to compliance risks for
not having traceability for all required activities. Using manual
procedures means that your compliance and audit costs go high, hitting
your bottom line and exposing your company and employees to fines or
penalties.

One of the key values of BPM is to fill these process
whitespaces and make your business more efficient. The idea is not to
replace your existing systems or applications. The idea is to leverage
your applications (CRM, ERP, SCM) and define an end-to-end efficient
process that fills the whitespaces. Let the applications do what they
are best at. Do not make unnatural customizations to COTS applications
to fit your processes. Use BPM to bring application together and create
custom processes. Any activity that is performed in BPM based
application is auditable, efficient and enhances visibility across your
business. Check out this demo that talks about using BPM to create efficient processes on top of your applications. Read the full article here.